Impact

Impact

Founded in 1940, the Industrial Areas Foundation is the nation's largest and longest-standing network of local faith and community-based organizations.

The IAF partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to build broad-based organizing projects, which create new capacity in a community for leadership development, citizen-led action and relationships across the lines that often divide our communities.

The IAF created the modern model of faith- and broad-based organizing and is widely recognized as having the strongest track record in the nation for citizen leadership development and for helping congregations and other civic organizations act on their missions to achieve lasting change in the world.

The IAF, which includes the West / Southwest IAF and Metro IAF, currently works with thousands of religious congregations, non-profits, civic organizations and unions, in more than sixty-five cities across the United States and in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany.

IAF in Action

The morning after an assembly in which hundreds of San Fernando Valley leaders of One LA leveraged commitments from District 3 candidates to ensure sufficient funding for the ‘My Health LA’ program, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to invest $6 Million inadditional dollars for the program.

TMO leaders celebrated the leveraging of one million dollars for Capital IDEA-Houston this month. The first half million was awarded by the Texas Innovative Accelerated Career Education (ACE) program that the Texas IAF created and passed in 2013.

Austin Interfaith leveraged a historic living wage concession from AISD school board members in a close-to-midnight vote approving the use of federal Davis-Bacon wage standards for workers employed on school construction projects.

Confronted with 40,000 unemployed & underemployed, while good manufacturing jobs remained unfilled and training facilities underutilized, DuPage United leaders worked together to form a novel plan. Targeting 9,000 replacement skilled-jobs set to become available over the next ten years, DuPage established Career Connect Metro West(CCMW) to connect people to training programs for quality living-wage jobs in western Cook, DuPage and the Fox River towns of Kane and Kendall Counties. Partnering with the Jan Addams Resource Corp.

With 650 people in attendance and 40 institutions represented in the roll call, Metro Vancouver Alliance launched a brand new organization in Canada. The assembly included senior political and religious leaders including the Catholic Archbishop and the newly invested Anglican Bishop. in addition to a plethora of younger people and diverse faces in the crowd.

VIP and Arizona Interfaith Network leaders celebrated the passage and signing of groundbreaking legislation which will increase minimum penalties for sex-trafficking of minors. Both organizations were early supporters of HB 2454, which will more than double the penalty for a child-prostitution conviction from 10 years to 24 years in prison, and make pimping a racketeering offense.